Alternative City Capture Options

That's my thought. The extra partisan units really add friction to an invasion.

Now if we could just make the AI use those free units intelligently! :(
 
I agree we want to find a simple solution. There's basically three situations in war:

A. High happiness
Puppet cities to lose only defense & happiness buildings.

B. Low happiness
Raze cities to destroy most buildings and population.

C. Cripple opponent
Pillage the countryside without attacking cities.


We could rename "raze" to "sack" for flavor. They sound similar. We destroy population and buildings slowly for gold when razing, while sacking would do it all at once. I could add code to automatically sell off one building per turn in razing cities to simplify that process. I could also make razing instantly lose somewhat more population to help deal with extremely large cities, and possibly auto-pillage one nearby tile improvement per turn.

I think the key difference is a historical one. It's very rare to see cities completely destroyed in history, as someone pointed out earlier. They were usually sacked, not razed... which we might be able to simulate with other methods. The "no city razing" option does something like that.


Edit: I just realized something really important about BNW. Capturing cities has a higher warmonger penalty, while declaring war to pillage has a lower penalty. Going on a pillaging spree has very little diplomatic impact. We should try this more!

An additional penalty of sacking a city could be a city population loss
Keep in mind the law of unintended consequences here: Someone will be going on a conquest spree and use and use this population reduction as a way to keep happiness problems in check turning it from a disadvantage into a strong advantage.

As Zaldron said, population adds unhappiness, so big cities are harder to conquer.

Say Bismark has 20:c5happy: and 2 French cities to conquer. Each French city has 12:c5citizen:, so Bismark drops to 20-32 = 12 :c5angry:. This lowers unit strength and forces him to slow conquest. If the population of the French cities drops by half instead, Bismark's happiness remains 20-20 = 0 :c5happy: with no penalty.

Razing cities and mass murder makes people happy in Civ. It's important to remember this, because it's not intuitively obvious.
 
yeah I do wish that the city population was cut in half upon taking a city. I just conquered a size 32 city. It's been a long time and it's still in revolt.

Another issue that needs to be addressed is the puppet/occupy stuff. Having a puppet city seems okay right now. It hurts your science rate to puppet a city, but helps with gold and other things. It's a good option for small cities.

The weirdness comes in after you decide to occupy the city. It adds a mere +1 unhappiness and functions like a normal city (not sure totally about this). Occupying a city should give more around +3 unhappiness and still give the penalties of a puppet city, in addition to a hit on the culture rate. Building a courthouse should then be a priority to make it a normal city. Having a permanent occupied city should be very undesirable.

Also, courthouses shouldn't have as high of a price as they did in GEM. It should be fairly expensive, but not massive. Maybe it should depend on the size of the city and what era you are in. They should be virtually impossible to just buy with gold. Maybe 600% purchase cost.
 
I'd be fine with city population being cut in half for purposes of revolt calculations. I'd rather it still offers a high happiness hit from the full large population, and we need a reason to build courthouses (both for happiness and to remove puppet style economic penalties). Courthouses should have a high gold cost yes. The reason they were so high in GEM was that the per/pop cost effect modifier wasn't working, so it was more expensive on smaller cities, and cheaper on larger cities.
 
I'd be fine with city population being cut in half for purposes of revolt calculations. I'd rather it still offers a high happiness hit from the full large population, and we need a reason to build courthouses (both for happiness and to remove puppet style economic penalties). Courthouses should have a high gold cost yes. The reason they were so high in GEM was that the per/pop cost effect modifier wasn't working, so it was more expensive on smaller cities, and cheaper on larger cities.

Agree with all this. I'm really leery about adding any extra options, I think puppet, annex->courthouse and raze as the only options are fine.

One question: does anyone know what the current diplomatic penalties for razing are? Does a razed city still count towards how much other civs hate me for my aggression (I assume yes). Does razing cities make other players hate me more than they would if I just kept the city? (I assume yes for the player whose city it was, no for everyone else.)
 
I don't think razing has any effect on diplomacy. I believe it's just like you still owned the conquered city. The only effect of mass murdering the citizens is people becomes happier! :crazyeye:

Here's how city capture happened in Gem. Say we capture Paris at 30 :c5citizen: population. Paris resists for 14 turns, 1 citizen dies, 3 refugees flee to a new capital, and 1 citizen turns into a military unit at the new capital. The city lost all happiness and defense buildings, plus a random quantity of others.



I just thought of one difference between razing and sacking: we can't raze capitals or citystates, but could sack them. This would especially help civs like Mongolia that focus on citystate conquest. We could set up a simple option: puppet to keep most buildings and population intact, or sack to kill half the populace and most buildings. Sacking wouldn't do any other special effects. Razing remains an option in non-capital cities.
 
I don't think razing has any effect on diplomacy.
I'm pretty sure I remember having seen a "you razed one of our cities" diplomacy penalty.

Here's how city capture happened in Gem. Say we capture Paris at 30 population. Paris resists for 14 turns, 1 citizen dies, 3 refugees flee to a new capital, and 1 citizen turns into a military unit at the new capital. The city lost all happiness and defense buildings, plus a random quantity of others.
This seems fine to me.

I just thought of one key difference between razing and sacking: we can't raze capitals or citystates, but could sack them. This would especially help civs like Mongolia that focus on citystate conquest. We could set up a simple option: puppet to keep most buildings and population intact, or sack to kill half the populace and most buildings. Sacking wouldn't do any other special effects. Razing remains an option in non-capital cities.
Won't the mongols already have bigger bonuses from city state capture?
Adding city state liberation-on-conquest to an Honor policy might help too.
 
I realized something: we're basically adding a vanilla method back in as an option. "Annex or puppet?" is not a real choice for cities in resistance, while "destroy or keep?" is a decent option. :)

Unmod
Annex - lose half pop
Puppet - lose half pop

Gem
Annex - keep intact
Puppet - keep intact

Cep
Puppet - lose half pop
Puppet - keep intact
 
City razing and capturing a city deliver the same diplomatic penalty in Civ 5 BNW according to an exhaustive study done by Putmalk.

@Ahriman: The "You Razed One of Our Cities!" penalty was from Civ 4 (in my old games it could grow to a -60 penalty with just a few razings! Yikes!). It's also present in Civ 4: Colonization.

I like the extra gold from pillaging, it makes raiding incursions more feasible as a tactic. I think that offers a decent alternative to the city sacking I proposed earlier, it's simpler, and the AI uses it pretty well.
 
Civ games often lack story or emotion, and I realized we could add some with a story for each option. Say we capture Bursa. We get the same options as before (puppet intact, puppet sacked, or raze) with normal gameplay effects, but different narratives.

"The mayor of Bursa surrendered to your army. How do we respond?

Mercy
Accept the surrender, and avoid further casualties or destruction. Lingering dissent reduces your unhappiness by 10 :c5angry:.

Force
Refuse the surrender and kill dissenters, immediately losing half the population. Your happiness drops to by 5 :c5angry:.

Wrath
Immediately kill half the population, then burn the city to the ground. Your happiness temporarily drops by 10 :c5angry:, then slowly recovers as you raze the city.​



I wonder if the actions of participants in ancient wars actually had much diplomatic impact on third parties unconnected to the conflict? It's hard to know, because unbiased accounts of war basically don't exist. The losers are dead and winners sought ways to justify their actions.

War changed somewhat in the 1800s. Before then, wounded soldiers were usually left to die on battlefields. There weren't organizations to help the injured. There was little distinction between civilians and soldiers, losing populations were enslaved or killed, and property was looted or burned. Leaving cities intact like the Ottomans entering Constantinople was rare.

There were a few events in the 1800s that changed this. Henry Dunant's memoirs about the horrors of war inspired the formation of the Red Cross to aid wounded soldiers. This movement led to several international treaties to restrain the destruction of war. The first treaty recognized the neutrality of the Red Cross, and allowed it access to battlefields. The second expanded this agency to sailors at sea. The third set guidelines for the treatment of prisoners of war. It wasn't until the fourth treaty in 1949 that leaders tried formally recognizing a difference between civilians and soldiers. Henry Dunant lived in Geneva, and agreements are called "conventions" in diplomacy, so we call those treaties the Geneva Conventions.

This went alongside the rise of professional armies. Ancient forces were usually armed farmers who fought a while, then returned home to harvest crops, before returning to war again. Soldiers were civilians and vice versa. As things like the industrial revolution let more people become full-time paid soldiers, a distinction formed between military and civilian groups. If ancient soldiers were civilians, would people distinguish between civilian or military targets after capturing a city? Would diplomatic penalties even be possible when communication took years to reach outside groups?
 
I always thought "buildings destroyed" was too excessive. In many cases, it might be better to raze and 20pop city and build a new settler in its place. We should retain more buildings upon conquest, otherwise there is no point...
 
I agree. I focus destruction on defense and happiness buildings. Destroying defenses makes sense and allows the enemy to recapture the city, while losing happiness buildings makes it harder to sustain a war campaign.
 
I wonder if the actions of participants in ancient wars actually had much diplomatic impact on third parties unconnected to the conflict?
My general impression is that in ancient/classical era, the general expectation was that an army would approach a city and demand its surrender. If they surrendered without a fight, then you'd take over, do a bit of looting and maybe kill the guys in charge, but otherwise leave them mostly unharassed. If they refused and you had to siege/fight, then basically anything goes once you take the city, including massacre.

This was so widespread as the norm that no-one was really surprised by sacking/pillaging/enslaving/razing, this was just the price you paid for resistance.

By the medieval era, I think it depended on religion. Christian Kingdoms were expected not to enslave/massacre/raze other Christian cities, though some looting was expected. And then against Muslims, anything goes. See for example the crusader conquest of Jerusalem and associated massacre of Muslims, and the idea that Saladin was fairly gracious in letting the wealthy Christians in Jerusalem leave with a ransom rather than be killed or enslaved.

By the Enlightenment, things had changed further, but still depended very much on the status of who was being conquered. If it was another "civilized" people then civilized rules were to be followed, but if they were Africans, or Indians, or other groups looked down on then anything goes. And of course in the really nasty wars like the 30 years war, atrocities became the norm on all side.

It's not really until the 20th century (and mass media) that we really start getting widespread condemnation of atrocities.

I don't know much outside of Europe/West Asia. In Mexico/Central America, there are pretty gruesome stories about mass sacrifice of conquered foes, but I don't know how widespread that was. The impression I have is that the Mongols largely followed the ancient/classical rules: surrender and live or resist and be massacred. It's a very effective terror/reputational way to get people to surrender to you without a fight.
 
I think Ahriman has it mostly right in his timeline of death and destruction. The Mongols were especially fastidious about punishing resistance, and also ensured cities remained mostly untouched - and protected - if they surrendered.

Maybe, if it contributes to gameplay, we can make a "Geneva Conventions" world congress/UN vote that if passed greatly reduces population loss and buildings destroyed through conquest? Maybe it also imposes a diplomatic penalty on those mean city razers if it passes. Right now when you raze a city, there's no consequence... everyone just whistles in the rain as it happens.
 
In the premodern era you razed a city once you captured it.

In the modern era we raze cities before we capture them! :D
 
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